November 25, 2014

Make 2 lists of 5 reasons why you were born, based on real-world facts about why events occurred that leading to your conception. No metaphysical speculation about God's plan or some needed function you are destined to serve. Just things that happened in the days, years, or moments before you happened.

List 1 should be terrible things that you would only feel
bad about were it not for the brutal truth that without them you would
not be here to experience the value of their nonoccurrence. Then amuse yourself with List 2 — nice things, things you can independently feel good about, quite aside from the fortuity that they led to you.

I'm working on my list and thought you might find it engaging to join me.

My great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War *after* my great-grandmother was born. (He survived, but was maimed and lame for life afterwards).

Dad's Dad became qualified to fly in WWI in early November 1918. His Mom was 38 when she had Dad -- the first of their kids! Mom's Dad drove an ambulance in WWI. Her Mom didn't want to spend life teaching Latin in Green Bay. Dad taught Chemical Warfare Survival to soldiers in WWII.

Okay, then in other words, you want a list of terrible things that occurred that you don't feel bad about because they enabled your Mom to get pregnant with you?

Whatever.

When I was conceived:

1. My Dad was just starting his residency at the Menninger Clinic. My parents and brother had been living in poverty when they lived in Brooklyn, New York while Dad was doing his internship at Kings County Hospital. It was very hard on Mom. Now, in a tract house in Sunflower Kansas, things were looking up.

1) During WW2, my dad's ship (USS San Francisco) was badly damaged during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal, with heavy loss of life. Dad was sent back to the States for OCS -- and got kicked out for slugging an instructor.

2) Instead, he received radio training, then was sent to Camp Pendelton (San Diego) to train with Marines preparing to invade Guam.

3) While at Camp Pendleton, he was able to get leave to head back up to his home town of San Pedro (Los Angeles) and take Jackie Fickes -- a girl he had had his eye on since high school -- out on one or more dates.

4) Jackie -- my mom -- says that during one of those wartime dates (1943), it was while they were dancing to "At Last" that she fell in love with him. But they broke up again because Mom was planning on being a Navy nurse, Dad said that she couldn't because Navy nurses had a bad reputation, and Mom said tough.

5) When Dad came back to San Pedro at the start of December 1945 (having, yes, landed with the Marines on Guam), Mom was engaged to someone else. Dad asked her out anyway, she said yes anyway, she broke off her engagement, and they eloped on December 30, 1945 -- the date she was actually supposed to marry this other guy.

Bad facts:(1) Irish potato famine => emigration from Ireland.(2) Influenza epidemic of 1918 => death of great-grandfather, causing his widow and four young children to move to another state to live with her sister, where my grandmother met my grandfather..(3) Grandfather knocked up grandmother (=> my father) who then were forced to marry.(4) Other grandmother didn't want more children, but grandfather did, leading to what would now be an illegal assault (and => my mother).(5) My mother's miscarriage after birth of my older brother => time to conceive me.

My father's Vietnam draft board was firebombed, which delayed his inevitable deployment just long enough for him to have his knee blown out in a semi professional football game. This injury "helped" him to become reclassified as 4F, which removed any chance of him being sent to war. He had made it clear to my mother prior to the firebombing that he would only marry her after he came back from the war (if he came back at all), so I guess that makes my conception dependent upon both of these unfortunate incidents (firebombing and football injury).

The bad:1. a rape by Genghis Khan2. famine due to farming a monoculture of potatoes3. religious persecution in Prussia4. a riot set off by my ancestor who raised the retail price of whiskey at his tavern on the Wabash river.5. a spontaneous abortion

The good:1. the custom of primogeniture led to taking a native american bride and pushing west into Ohio to homestead the frontier2. 32 individuals survived a war to end legal slavery3. a grandmother who was the only person to volunteer to wet-nurse a newborn orphaned infant who might have been Crack Emcee's grandmother4. 2 Methodist youth ministers of churches 10 miles apart decided to host 1 combined mixer because neither church had enough teens to warrant separate mixers5. 3 older siblings who were cute and lovable enough that my parents thought oh what the heck, let's give it another go

Apparently, the year I was born there was one hell of a party or something in the neighborhood in which my parents lived for Valentines Day. Because, nine months later, there were four of us kids born. Fortuitously, the surviving three of us all looked like our respective fathers. (One baby for right after being born.)

Anyhow...

If my parents hadn't gotten plastered that Valentines Day, I wouldn't have been born.

If my grandfather had not died when my mom was six months old, she probably would never have meet my father. He had a job that would have had them leave NY.

If Regents Scholarships had covered room and board, my parents probably would not have met. My mom would have gone to Cornell, and not have been at a party in Brooklyn to meet my dad.

If my dad hadn't been such a cut up in his youth, he might have wound up in a more dangerous role during WWII. (Calling the boatswain's mate "boatsy" wouldn't normally do you much good. But I think it kept him from being taken seriously enough to be put in a position where people HAD to count on him.)

I suppose I could go back to the Potato Famine, too. But that's already been done.

I like how so many are military-related. There are so few shared experiences in today's world and this one will fade soon.

Reading them, I have 2.

1. Both my parents families left Ireland in the potato famine.

2. My father comes from a Navy family so when the Korean War broke out, he joined the Navy and spent the war safely on a boat. Many of his friends joined the Marines and were killed when China entered the war.

Who knows where it starts, but the earliest we know is a great great great ... grandfather who fled the blood drenched 17th and 18th century German Palatines up to my father fighting the Africa Corps in WWII, and meeting my mother as part of the Allied occupation of Holland combined with survival of my great great great grandfather of the Civil War, etc etc etc, combined with an absolute infinity of lesser and greater factors that summed together led to the impossibly unlikely fact that the particular set of people alive on the planet were born and are alive today.

My parents would not have met unless World War 2 hadn't juxtaposed my Missouri dad and my California mom in New York City during Christmas 1943. My dad had just graduated as an ensign from the Navy's V-12 school, my mom was visiting a cousin during Christmas break while she was studying for her masters at GWU. It was the stuff of Hollywood, really. They were beautiful people. So, roughly fifty million people died so that I might eventually be conceived. Frankly, it was worth it.

Nevertheless, they maintained their distinctive culture until well into the nineteenth century and Palatine surnames are now diffused across the country. With regard to America, the English transported nearly 3,000 in ten ships to New York in 1710. Many of them first were assigned to work camps along the Hudson River to work off their passage. Close to 850 families settled in the Hudson River Valley, primarily in what are now Germantown and Saugerties, New York. In 1723 100 heads of families from the work camps were the first Europeans to acquire land west of Little Falls, New York, in present-day Herkimer County on both the north and south sides along the Mohawk River. Later additional Palatine Germans settled along the Mohawk River for several miles, founding towns such as Palatine Bridge, and in the Schoharie Valley. - Wikipedia

Found the above. There is a graveyard in that area full of headstones with my family name on them.

Or we live in an amoral and unfair universe where accidental and natural selection has led to the creation of everything from the stars to ourselves.

That is such a scary thought that even supposedly atheist liberals and feminists can't accept it. I do. I think a good working definition of a skeptical conservative is somebody who is insensitive to social pressure and accepts stuff like the above.

My dad graduated 8 months early from dental school (U of Minnesota and within 9 months was in england, then europe for 3 years in WW2. My mom was a nurse from KC that came to Europe in 1945 to relieve the first wave of nurses. He proposed within 3 weeks- she told him he had been in Europe too long. Three months later they were married in Linz, Austria and 6 kids and one miscarriage later here I am. Neither one talked about the war.

Good1. US Army decides 37 year old bartenders make great cooks, not so great riflemen. Dad assigned to field hospital – Geneva Convention non-combatant!2. Dad skips the trip to Sicily at war’s end, and comes straight home to NYC. 3. Mom ignores grandma, runs off with dad.4. Wife #3 – It’s a girl! And then, it’s a girl! Again!5. Mom and dad really want a son, they try one more time. 9 months later, on a Friday, they are en route to the hospital. Mom realizes it’s the 13th. Makes dad turn around. Mom has contractions at home until 1A. Back to the hospital. I am born on Saturday, the 14th.

God bless you, grandpa, for getting on the boat, and getting off in NYC, and not Argentina like your brother!

1. Hitler's mom and dad fucked.2. Hitler survived the gassing in the WWI trenches3. The Japs thought Hirohito was a god.4. The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor5. Millions died horrible deaths

List 2:

1. My mom was a sweet innocent thing, and my dad was raised by a dominating woman with very sharp elbows.2. They met while studying electrical engineering at Swarthmore3. She developed the tracking capabilities of radar.4. He worked on the Manhattan project at Oak Ridge5. Hundreds of thousands of Japs were incinerated.

Other than that, I don't even try to picture my parents fucking or the circumstances of the event.

1. I grew up as the oldest of nine in a very poor family because my dad was a drunk. I therefore moved away from home as soon as I could.

2. Though my dad later got sober, I did not enjoy his company in the same way that my eight siblings did.

3. As overcompensation for poor social standing and lack of friends, I read everything and did very well in school.

4. I went through early adulthood with a huge chip on my shoulder, feeling simultaneously superior and alienated. I made few friends.

5. As things didn't go my way professionally, I took to drinking as an avoidance technique, which eventually ruined my marriage, cost me the house and most of my belongings, and the love of my children.

Is that what you have in mind? How about some happy things:

1. In my Air Force career, I flew all around the world. Been in over 70 countries and lived in Europe for three years.

2. I commanded an aeromedical evacuation mission carrying two premature babies from Korea to Hawaii. One lived and one died.

2. Because of my stumbling career path, I found myself accidentally in the right place to make a big contribution planning two military campaigns.

1. Religious persecution in England during the 1600s.2. A grandfather who was gay, but closeted, and alcoholic. He married a nice girl from San Antonio in 1916 and stayed around long enough for my mother to be born.3. The other grandfather who was a draft "slacker" during the first World War (this is not that bad) and lived to father twin boys (my Dad was the younger).4. A Mom so disaffected by her alcoholic father's abandonment of the family, she married for security and stability (my Dad) not for love (the heir to a banking fortune). They were together for 51 years until she died. She told my sister she never loved my Dad, but he was always there.

The Good -

1. I have 3 grown and independent sons, and two wonderful grandsons.2. A life that has been productive and positive - once I came out of the closet.3. A wonderful life with a bona-fide 100% Cajun man (who cooks, of course).4. Retirement in the Smoky Mountains.

Our hostess only requested 5 items in each list. If 6 were permitted, I would add the following to each list:

6. My ancestors mastered the art of exercising unrighteous dominion over our melanin-enabled brethren without giving the outward appearance of doing so and thereby perfecting systemic, pervasive and engrained white supremacy which can only be summoned up when certain dog whistles are sounded.

Trashhauler - Great story. Had you pegged as a (130/141/C5) driver from your screen name.Sad about your path, glad about where you are now. Congrats for making it work.DanPS It could have been worse. You could be "Gaspasser" ;)

My great-grandfather died young and left my great grandmother nearly destitute with four children, in Lithuania.My grandparents pig farm failed and Great Depression destroyed their savings.My mom had a miscarriage.My mom had another miscarriage.My parents lost my older sister at birth.

My grandfather and grandmother both liked ice skating.My grandmother was the prettiest of nine daughters.My mother loved baseball.My father was a ruthless knuckleballer. My parents enjoyed traveling each spring.

I don't know have much to add outside of invention and historical extrapolation, except for a bad and good item that is the same item:

Bad:

1. Great-grandfather is commanded by prophet to take second wife and move to desolate farming community.

Good:

1. Great-grandfather likes second wife. Grandmother grows up in desolate farming community. Community is too poor to support a secondary school so she is sent to board with a family in a bigger town that happens to include a smart, ambitious, but very shy eldest son.

My grandmother's life-path includes being abandoned when she was three days old. Any other path probably doesn't put her together with my grandfather.

Funny:

I'm born 9mo after Valentine's Day. So are about half of my multitudinous cousins. It is a family joke, which we have just finished sending on yet another trip 'round the horn.

Just Happenstance:

My parents' surnames were adjacent to each other on an alphabetically-ordered high school class roll; this determined the seating chart, which in turn determined the students' partners for exercises; and here I am.

It's been a few decades since I heard that one. Thanks for the chuckle. My college roommate became a 135 pilot, did his 7 and signed on with Delta.My fave USAF line from back then was:"Screw the Russians... the real enemy is the NAVY!"Dan

My other grandparents were raging alcoholics and that side of the family was a complete mess.

My Moms first fiancee died in a car accident before they got married.

My Dad was in college and his draft number was not reached so he didn't go to Vietnam.

My mom was on the pill when I was conceived.

Sorry that is 6.

Nice things? If you take strictly secular descriptions of how it happened, the several 1 in a million chances that led to a specific sperm and egg combination on that particular day? Anything nice revolves around destiny and religious stuff. I haven't really made it that far yet.

Yeah, you are the exception. You are the person who would have been born anyway, had none of the wars in history have happened. Why not?

I guess the reason I was born is that there was an almost infinitely unlikely fluctuation in the quantum substrate that happened just so about 15 billion years ago, to the best of our ability to calculate. Anything that happened before that will likely remain unknowable for the remainder of human existence.

1. There was a war on. My father wanted to leave something behind if he did not return. (He returned.)2. My mother was 20 years old and beautiful and my father could not resist her.3. Having children seemed the natural order of things to my parents.4. My mother was young and healthy and had a healthy pregnancy.5. My parents had less than four weeks between their wedding and his going overseas so chance and luck were involved.

My wife was born because her father survived four years in Japanese prison camps during the war, and in particular because the nuclear bombings (one of which he saw from a distance of about 30 miles) broke the will of the Japanese. He was approaching death from disease, starvation and overwork (copper mine) in August of 1945, and probably would have been shot had there been an invasion of Japan if he was still alive.

I was born because abortion was not just illegal and unobtainable in Lyman County but also unthinkable in 1936. My mom had already had four children and our family was living on what was then a subsistence farm. My parents were brave, resourceful and protective. We all survived to old age.

My father was in his senior year of college in December 1941. The president of the college appealed to the undergraduate men to resist the urge to enlist immediately, and the Army provided ROTC training during their final semester. In a three day period in May 1942 he graduated with a degree in EE, was sworn in as a second lieutenant, married my mother, and boarded a train for Ft. Ord, California (the first time he had been outside the state of Illinois, I believe). He was in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France. When he returned to the United States my mother was able to join him while he took training to become a field grade officer, and apparently the two of them couldn't keep their hands off each other. He left the service after VJ Day.

The bad:WWI-My grandfather slogged through France.The Good:He survived to raise 7 children on a red dirt cotton farm in Mississippi during the depression.The bad:They had no moneythe Good:He refused to take government help & told his children that government cheese was poison. (Come to think of it, he was prescient)The bad:My Dad's first flight upon entering the Army Air Corps was on a B-17 that caught fire over Louisiana causing him to have to bail out through the bomb bay doors, striking his head on the way out.The good:He didn't lose consciousThe bad:He was stationed in a Hell hole in Mississippi.The good:He met a gorgeous red head, married her almost immediately, & notified his parents with a post card picture taken on the street, with a hand written note saying "Just married"The bad:He didn't have enough money to have 4 kidsThe good:They became productive citizens anyway through force of will & yes, switches on the legs.The bad:I spent 29 months on an ocean going minesweeper during Vietnam.The good:It was at once, the worst & best thing that ever happened to me.The bad:Having to make up for 18 hours of "F"s upon returning to collegeThe good:Managing to stay on the Deans list while partying like a maniac, dropping freshmen who couldn't party & study like flies & earning a degree.The bad:A divorce with two kidsThe good:Managing to keep involved & guide them both to become Eagle Scouts & work their way through college, becoming employed, married & fathers.

I've been healthy all my life. That's the upside.. I can't help but think that there must be some combination of my fathers sperm and mother's egg that would have resulted in a center fielder for the NY Yankees. There's lots of downside to my existence. I just don't want to discuss it.......We're all flukes floundering in happenstance.

Given the answers I seen so far this is more of a how question than a why question.

A lot of the replies involved war, mostly it's an antecedent, typically a father who avoids death in combat, which creates procreative opportunities that would not have existed if the said antecedent had gotten his ass blasted by a kraut or a jap.... A bit facile if you ask me.

These histories appear to assume so some kind a fatalism at work, i.e. if given male A survives long enough to meet female B, then the function A + B inevitably follows, producing Althouse commentator C. If this kind of thinking really answers the question why was C born? then we're ignoring the much less likely outcome created by a given sperm from A beating out all it's millions of brethren in the Fertilization Derby that really led to C.

ken in tx wrote: My father married my mother when he got out of the Navy. He wouldn't have been there if the bomb hadn't have been dropped, and neither would I.

I'm sorry Ken, but your reasoning here is baloney. (I'm not picking on you specifically, btw, what I have to say applies to the majority of those who have commented here.) There is a virtual infinity of possibilities of hale and hearty survival of your father even if Truman had declined to use the Bomb on Japan. Many argue that the use of nuclear weapons against Japan saved millions of lives, both American and Japanese, and I agree that that is both reasonable and likely. What is not reasonable or likely is the assertion that the Bomb saved anybody in particular, your father included.

then we're ignoring the much less likely outcome created by a given sperm from A beating out all it's millions of brethren in the Fertilization Derby that really led to C

Nobody's ignoring that. Of course that was the final surmounting of incredible odds, and that final role of the dice was affected by every factor that every affected either parent in the history of all factors that affected either's ancestors going back to the first string of DNA and beyond.

There is no reason that anybody was born precisely because there are so many reasons, limited only by degrees of freedom in the Universe I guess, as to make any one factor insignificant. The thing about war is that it is a factor that mixed populations in unusual ways and affected huge numbers of people. Sure, my dad might not have been killed in the Pacific, but it is certain that he would not have married my mother had he gone. So, among the astronomical number of reasons I was born is the dropping of the atomic bomb. That is not facile at all.

Had we dealt with Indians fairly and honestly.Had the pandemic that wiped out huge populations of Indians before settlers arrived not happened.Had slavery not happened.Had the Indian Wars in the west not happened.

Not a single human being alive today would be alive today. There would be some completely different set of humans alive. People need to realize that, I think, and get over the past and live for the future.

Why was I born? The Triumph of the Will. Every cell in every living thing is impelled by the drive to replicate. After my conception, the collective will that favored my birth was sufficient to overcome all the adversarial forces.

This is a wonderful thread. So many touching stories, and so many fathers like mine. He, too, was destined for combat in the Pacific until Providence intervened.

My Dad was on an LST and his combat job was to drive a Higgins boat full of Marines up on the beach. How long do think he would have survived during the invasion? What are the odds?

Impossible to calculate for an invasion that didn't happen. However, given the example of the Normandy landings where Higgins boats were used en masse the chances of survival were very good; D-day fatal casualties among boat coxswains were about 3 percent. But this is irrelevant. There are infinite universes in which you exist, Ken, and an larger infinity of universes where you do not (Surprise! Not all infinities are equal.) Picking one as your favorite timeline is your prerogative, but it is indefensible logically.

While paying a cashier at Walmart I dropped a penny. When I looked for it I discovered that it had come to rest standing on its edge! The unlikelihood of that outcome dominated my thoughts for many hours thereafter. Then I realized that that outcome was about as likely as any other for a dropped penny, even though I could spend a lifetime dropping pennies and not see a duplication of that event.

Just so with your genes. There's a finite combination of genes available for gametes. Men get a better shot at covering all the possibilities; women have a much smaller chance. Since there's finite set of genetically unique sperm, and a much smaller set of unique ova there's a finite change that a couple may produce two genetically identical children who are not twins. Yet in all recorded history there is not one case of that outcome happening. The interesting fact is that the odds of a couple having two identical children are about the same as the odds of your parents having you, Ken. Chaos rules, not Order.

My mother had my half-sister out of wedlock at 16 and raised her on her own for some time, until she met a kindly man ten years her senior who wanted to take care of the both of them and have a few more babies. I was the first of the additional children. Without the teenage pregnancy and single motherhood, my mother would never have been interested in my dad.

My husbands' parents carried on a five-year-long affair resulting in his inadvertent conception; they divorced their spouses and left previous children in order to marry each other and raise him. His mother frequently tells him that had abortion been legal when he was conceived she would have certainly have "gotten rid of" him. I'm so very grateful that she did not. He is magnificent and has improved the lives of many.

My grandfather was drafted into WWI and was on a ship heading for Europe on November 11, 1918. I celebrate armistice day as a personal holiday. After his return he married by grandmother and they had 9 children, one of whom was my mother. When she had just graduated from high school in 1952, bored with small town life she responded to the romantic exotic description my father gave her of his life at Seward Air Force Base in Alaska, flew up there with only enough money for a one way trip, and married him.

My great-grandmother was born in hillbilly country in Kentucky. She married a well-to-do man in something of a mail-order bride situation. She had her first child with him, but was very unhappy. When the young boy was 5 or 6, he asked his daddy why he wouldn't just let momma go, since she was so unhappy. He agreed, and sent her on her way with the boy, a train ticket, and a bit of cash.

She landed in Arkansas, where she met my great-grandfather, then finishing medical school.